


Snap

by FictionPenned



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Abstract, Alex asked why we even have this lever, End of the World
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-27
Updated: 2020-01-27
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:35:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22439635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FictionPenned/pseuds/FictionPenned
Summary: “Time, time’s been collapsing around me. Old friends, old problems, old me. It’s happened before, but this is different, this isn’t something I can fix. This -- this is universe-altering. Think of time like a rubber band, stretch it too far, and at first the two sides touch, and then it --”SNAPS.The world almost seems to stop moving. The air itself changes. The Doctor feels as though she has been plunged into the cold, clear waters of the Arctic Ocean, but she is still standing here, in her TARDIS. This has happened once before, when she had thrown herself into a crack in the fundamental fabric of the universe in order to save it, but she had been the only one affected, and she had known, she had hoped, she had believed that glorious, incredible, amazing Amelia Pond would be able to bring her back. This isn’t like that. This is the universe itself freezing over. This is time racing backwards and forwards and folding in on itself until nothing is left.Do you want some depressing, nostalgic, abstract, slow-death-of-the-universe content written in the inhumane hours of the morning? You've got it.
Comments: 9
Kudos: 55





	Snap

“ _ Oh _ .”   
  
The word sinks to the floor with the intensity of a lead weight. The lights of the TARDIS flicker and dim, alternating between the cool dread of blue and the warm excitement of orange-tainted realization. The Doctor leans against the console, palms flat against the glass and metal, not caring what buttons get bumped or what switches get flipped. If the theory creeping towards the front of her mind is right, then none of that matters anymore. She can see the warped and twisted reflections of her friends in its surface, but she doesn’t dare drag her eyes up to meet theirs. She’s used to delivering bad news -- not good at it, by any stretch of the imagination, but used to it -- but  _ this _ … this is something else. Something bigger than bad news.    
  
“Complicated space-time events. Every time traveller is one, every Time Lord, every time agent, every weeping angel, every hot-headed kid picking up a vortex manipulator for cheap on a junk planet. Each and every one of them challenges the limits of their existence, and how does the universe deal with it?” She pushes herself away from the console, hands waving aimlessly through the air next to her head as she gathers her thoughts and tames them into something manageable. “It stretches. It grows to accommodate them. It makes room where it can, but what if it’s too much? What if the continuum can only go so far?”   
  
“Doc?” Graham steps forward, voice full of concern, but she ignores him. 

“I stared into the schism as a kid. I looked into it and I saw all of time. I saw where it began and when it ended. We looked at each other, and I never thought to question those limits. I just kind of assumed others had done it, that the Founders had thought before building an entire civilization around  _ time _ .”

“Are you okay?” Yaz’s comforting voice falls on her ears, but the Doctor keeps talking. Her words get ever quicker, desperation fraying their edges. She needs to work her way to the end of the problem.   
  
“Time, time’s been collapsing around me. Old friends, old problems, old  _ me _ . It’s happened before, but this is different, this isn’t something I can fix. This -- this is  _ universe-altering _ . Think of time like a rubber band, stretch it too far, and at first the two sides touch, and then it --”

**SNAPS** .

The world almost seems to stop moving. The air itself changes. The Doctor feels as though she has been plunged into the cold, clear waters of the Arctic Ocean, but she is still standing here, in her TARDIS. This has happened once before, when she had thrown herself into a crack in the fundamental fabric of the universe in order to save it, but she had been the only one affected, and she had known, she had  _ hoped _ , she had  **believed** that glorious, incredible, amazing Amelia Pond would be able to bring her back. This isn’t like that. This is the universe itself freezing over. This is time racing backwards and forwards and folding in on itself until nothing is left.    
  
It is chilling in its finality.    
  
Green eyes finally drag themselves to her friends’ faces, full of love and guilt and unspoken regrets. A blink and she sees them as children, another blink and they’re old -- older than she is -- older than any humans have ever been.    
  
“I’m -- I’m so sorry.” 

Dragging the words from her lungs is a gargantuan effort, and even then, she is not quite sure if she managed it, not quite sure if they were heard, not quite sure if it matters in the end. Perhaps nothing has ever mattered, if this is how the universe dies. All those centuries racing across time and space, believing that she was helping people along the way, improving their lives in countless ways, and all she had been doing was wearing away at the fabric of the universe, bit by bit. She may not have been the only person operating in a doomed system, but she should have known better. She should have thought harder and asked more questions and pumped the brakes before it was too late. 

Faces blur and shift as tears gather in the corners of her eyes, and suddenly it feels as though the ship as turned sideways, and almost languidly, she settles onto sideways on a park bench, with a familiar figure cross-legged on the pavement in front of her.    
  
“Chip?” Bill asks, holding the carton up.    
  
“Probably shouldn’t.” The Doctor’s tongue clings to the sentence as if it’s a particularly sticky question. She isn’t entirely sure if she is even speaking for herself anymore, or if there’s some other version of her speaking through her, falling back into familiar patterns. It feels almost like being caught in a dream where you are willing your legs to move but can’t seem to make any headway. “Trying to give up salt. Tricky thing salt. Useful in case of poisoning, not always useful for much else.”   
  
“More for me, then.”   
  
A shadow passes through the Doctor’s peripheral vision, and she sits up with a jolt, fighting to get a good look at it. No matter how much she turns her head, it stays in the corner, slowly and inexorably spreading.    
  
“You alright?” The chips find a home on the pavement as Bill slowly stands, gaze flicking between the Doctor’s face and her eye line.    
  
A tired sigh precedes brutal honesty. “No. You ever feel a universe collapse before?”

The shadow spreads, blotting out light and the park and the face of her long lost friend. It is darkness so absolute that it seems to be the only thing in existence. Cold, uncaring, void, consuming all that stubbornly clings to life. She first feels as though she is being swept away by it, and then as though she is falling through it, pulled down and down forever with nowhere but madness to land.    
  
The Doctor doesn’t know how much time passes -- or if indeed, whether it passes at all -- before she falls from one world into the next, right into a pair of willing arms. The tinny sounds of a 1940s dance standard intertwine with Pachelbel's Canon and a song that she vaguely recognizes from a spa on a diamond planet called Midnight. It makes the where and when of the setting difficult to grasp, but as soon as her rescuer speaks, she knows the who. 

"Glad I caught you, Doctor, and might I say, you’re looking ravishing.” He swings her upright and she finds herself nose-to-nose with Jack Harkness. His voice is chipper, but there is something lurking in his eyes that suggest, he, too, can feel the slow death of the world as time slips through their fingers. They are both immortals, or close enough to it, and have both become intimately acquainted with the passage of time in a way that her other companions could never manage.    
  
“Does this feel wrong to you?” she asks, eyes narrowing.    
  
“Very. Do you want to talk about it?” They are so close that she can smell the mint on his breath. Jack Harkness, always prepared for proximity, even when the world is falling down.    
  
“No.” It feels silly to linger on something this terrible, something so large that the scope of it lies far outside their ability to change. The universe is dying, time is folding in on itself, and she might as well cling to these little moments while she can. Who knows what might lie on the other side. 

“Okay.”   
  
One of his hands finds hers, linking their fingers together while the other settles on her waist. The beat of the blended music is ephemeral and impossible to find, but Jack sets his own. Slow, sad, a last goodbye before the world falls down. Breath catches in the back of her throat as tears threaten to overwhelm her again, and she rests her head against his chest. She doesn’t want him to see her like this.    
  
The hand on her waist moves up to her hair and then she falls again. Down, down, down into the endless, devouring darkness. 

She spends a brief moment drenched in rain on a street corner, hands stuffed into the pocket of her coat as she watches Donna Noble go to to know with an unknown stranger in a shop window. Every part of her itches to step forward, but even at the close of the universe, she stops herself. It would be selfish to risk stirring up dangerous memories, selfish to drag an old friend into the fires of suffering simply to soothe old wounds and assuage old guilt.    
  
After a long minute, drenched to the bone, she turns and cuts down an alleyway that never seems to end. The walls stretch higher and the street stretches longer and suddenly there is a child beside her, small breaths frosting in the cold, wet air.    
  
“I can fix this,” the child says, looking up at the Doctor with wide eyes.    
  
“Fix what?” For a moment there is hope. It is fainter than the furthest star, but it still glimmers in her chest. Children have always been the way of the future, have always been able to see things that adults can’t, but golden energy gathers and pools around the child’s hands, and her hope dies in bitter disappointment.    
  
Feet frantically pedal backwards as she tries to outpace the regeneration energy, tries to avoid being burned by the sheer force of someone else’s life, but light fills her visions and she stumbles.    
  
The darkness carries her to 1969, to a shop that had both sustained and infuriated her. The racks of clothes smell like a ginger, perfume, and the attic of a hundred grandmothers, and it goes straight to her head, making her dizzy. Time Lords have always been susceptible to ginger. It’s why Martha had filled the place with it, to keep the Doctor and their contraptions out of her space while she desperately fought to keep them housed and safe until they could find a way out. She never thanked Martha for that. Never thanked Martha for anything. Never gave her half the credit that she deserved. Doctor Martha Jones, a woman who could conquer the world if she wanted to.    
  
“Doctor?”   
  
The Doctor turns, blonde hair flying. “I’m sorry.” The words tumble out of her mouth quickly, desperate to beat the darkness that creeps back around her feet. “You deserved better. I --”   
  
Grass and rocks press into her back and ringing plagues her ears. Everything hurts. She can’t bear this much longer, bouncing between moments will tear her apart, push her to madness, send her spiralling faster than the death of the universe can claim her.    
  
“Do you think she’s dead?” Scottish accent lends the words a charming lilt.    
  
“Being struck by lightning doesn’t usually kill you.” That voice is familiar, too. Nurse, father, centurion. “No, no, no, you shouldn’t --” 

A shoe pokes her in the side. “Oi, you’re still alive, yeah?”   


The Doctor doesn’t get a chance to answer, doesn’t get a moment to breathe or open her eyes before the dark current sweeps her under again. She begs it to stop, pleads with it, screams into the uncaring emptiness until her voice grows hoarse, but nothing changes. It doesn’t stop. It doesn’t give way. It doesn’t abate. It persists for weeks and days and hours and minutes until orange light finally creeps in, and she’s breathing the smoke of a dead planet, skin and clothes coated in ash and dust.    
  
_ Home _ .    
  
_ Still here. _ _   
_ _   
_ _ Still burning _ .

“You get dropped here, too?” The voice sounds like a dozen voices at once. Childhood friends and best enemies and weapons dragged back from the dead. She turns, and the Master’s face is flickering, too, moving between an endless parade of faces, interrupted only to haunt her with the purple and blistered visage of a monster who had been burned to the point of death. She can’t fix on it for long without averting her eyes in quiet horror.   
  
“The universe is dying.” Her voice, too, is strange. Something beyond her. Something Other. “Time’s folding in on itself.”   
  
“Do you think it will reach here?”   
  
“I think it started here.”   
  
Silence folds over them as they stand together, watching the flames curl over the ruins that had once been their home, waiting for the darkness to claim them.    
  
It never comes. 

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know what this is. 4am me thought it was a good idea. Mid-afternoon me thinks it's weird but is willing to roll with it anyway.


End file.
